2.3 Collocation and collocability
2.3.3 Semantic/Discourse prosody
Although C ruse’s (1986, 2000) ‘contextual-relations’ model o f word meaning is useful in terms o f detecting potential ‘syntagm atic disaffinity’ in collocability, it fails to offer a satisfactory coverage o f the pragm atic associations in operation. His m odel efficiently works in relation to the semantic preference in contextual relations o f word meaning. Yet, the text producer (speaker or writer) is banished from the picture. This m ay aggravate the problematic status o f ‘discourse’, as being unm anageably ambiguous. Van Dijk (1997: 4) maintains that the use o f ‘discourse’ ‘is-not limited to language use or com municative interaction’, but it also refers to ‘ideas or ideologies’.
Several studies use the term ‘semantic prosody’ in reference to a ‘w ord’ that is
‘typically’ deployed in a ‘particular environm ent’, such that the word takes on ‘connotations’
from that environm ent (e.g. Sinclair 1991; Louw 1993, 1997; Stubbs 1996; Hunston 1995).
Hunston (2002: 141) cites Sinclair’s (1991) example: the semantic prosody o f the phrasal verb ‘SET in ’ as usually co-occurring with subjects ‘indicating something bad’ such as ‘bad weather, gloom, decline, or r o f . Louw (1993: 157) introduces the term ‘semantic prosody’ as
‘an evaluative or attitudinal tone a word articulates’; it is the ‘consistent aura o f meaning with which a form is imbued by its collocates’; and this would quite often involve the characteristic o f hinting at a ‘hidden meaning’ (ibid.: 160). However, it is not an in-built
-38-property o f a word - the same way as connotation is - but results from ‘the habitual co
occurrence between the word and a set o f words that share similar semantic traits’ (Partington 2004: 131). L ouw ’s (1993: 160) typical example in this regard is the w ord ‘utterly’. In his analysis, this word is considered to have a negative semantic prosody because it ‘frequently collocates with words w ith negative m eanings’.
Thus, semantic prosody cannot be easily accessed by means o f individual introspection or dictionaries; rather, it may be evident through concordancing numerous examples. This may be the reason why Sinclair’s (2004) exam inations do not often describe semantic prosodies as ‘positive’ or ‘negative’, since, for him, the sem antic prosody o f a word or phrase bears a ‘discourse function’. If we take Sinclair’s exam ple o f the phrase ‘naked eye’
a little further into analysis, in terms o f its semantic prosody, we can see that his analysis o f the phrase shows a semantic prosody o f ‘difficultly’: over 85% o f the concordance lines of the phrase exhibit a collocation between ‘see’ w ith words like ‘sm all’, ‘faint’, ‘w eak’, and
‘difficult’.
Based on L ouw ’s (2000: 57) definition o f semantic prosody as ‘a form o f meaning w hich is established through the proximity o f a consistent series o f collocates’, McEnery et al. (2006: 83) refer to semantic prosody as ‘[t]he collocational m eaning arising from the interaction between a given node word and its collocates’. Here, the em phasis is laid upon the pragm atic elem ent as a primary function of semantic prosody; and, most importantly, its realization as collocational meaning. N ot surprisingly, then, a w ord or phrase can carry a covert message because o f semantic prosody. In this connection a good exam ple is offered by Stubbs (1996: 188), where ‘the word form intellectuals' dem onstrates a strong negative prosody in the com pany o f collocates such as ‘activists, contempt, dissident, hippie, ideology, leftist, leftwing, liberal, students, young’. Interestingly, Stubbs (ibid.) continues with the
potentially negative prosody evoked by intellectuals in the collocation ‘Jewish intellectuals' , which can be suggestive o f a ‘covert m essage’ o f anti-Semitism.
In order for us to know more about such an interactive aspect o f meaning, let us focus on H unston’s (2002: 142) account o f the features o f semantic prosody: (1) it is a
‘consequence o f the m ore general observation that meaning can be said to belong to whole phrases rather than to single w ords’; (2) it can be observed ‘only by looking at a large number o f instances o f a word or phrase’; (3) it ‘accounts for “connotation” : the sense that a word carries a meaning in addition to its “real” m eaning’; (4) it can be ‘exploited, in that a speaker can use a word in an atypical way to convey [a] hidden m eaning’; (5) it is often ‘not accessible from a speaker’s conscious know ledge’.
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It is this pragmatic element that makes some scholars prefer the term ‘discourse prosody’ to ‘semantic prosody’ (Tognini-Bonelli 1996: 193, 209; Stubbs 2001: 66). In their view, the problem lies with the word ‘sem antic’ as part o f the term on the assumption that there needs to be a ‘distinction between aspects o f meaning w hich are independent o f speakers (semantics) and aspects which concern speaker attitude (pragm atics)’. This renders the term ‘pragmatic prosodies’, for them, a better choice. Still, however, as they presume, best o f all is the term ‘discourse prosodies’, as it is doubly useful. On one hand, it maintains
‘the relation to speakers and hearers’, and on the other it em phasizes ‘their function in creating discourse coherence’.
Again, problematic is the blurred distinction between the term s ‘semantic preference’ and ‘semantic/discourse prosody’: It is ‘not entirely clear-cut’ (Stubbs 2001: 66).
I would, nonetheless, concur with Stubbs’ opinion that the case is ‘partly a question o f sem antics versus pragm atics’ and that ‘the preference-prosody distinction may depend on how delicate the analysis is ’ (ibid.). Indeed, Baker (2006: 87) has raised the issue that there
are some inconsistencies between how the terms ‘semantic preference’ and ‘discourse prosody’ are used, making explicit that ‘patterns in discourse can be found between a word, phrase or lem m a and a set o f related words that suggest a discourse’. A nother issue has been raised by H unston (2007: 256) who argues that the view that the semantic prosody o f a word
‘expresses an evaluative tone, either positive or negative, seems to be a rather simplistic view o f attitudinal m eaning, since evaluation is basically linked to point o f view ’. As she (ibid.:
258) continues to argue, semantic prosody is tied to the ‘phraseology o f a w ord’; ‘if the phraseology changes, the semantic prosody becomes different’. This is w here qualitative analysis comes in. A CDA perspective would be o f overriding im portance here.